YouTube Ranking Factors – How to Rank Videos with YouTube SEO?

Video content assets tend to have a higher conversion rate compared to text, infographic or image making it crucial to understand how Youtube ranking works. In addition, YouTube Videos drives a 157% increase in organic traffic from SERPs (Wordstream, 2018), making it one of the most effective channels to increase a brand’s visibility exponentially.

3 of the common reasons why businesses need video production are corporate branding, customer acquisition and lead generation.

YouTube Channel SEO Optimization Checklist

Here are optimization tips for your YouTube channel and videos that will help you to start doing better in search, get recommended, and gain more traction.

YouTube Ranking Algorithm

YouTube doesn’t use backlinks, it analyzes user experience metrics to determine the quality of your content. If YouTube sees that your video engages users (i.e. has lots of comments, likes, and shares), it will rank better than a video with little engagement.

User Experience Metrics

Comment count

Length of the video

Video Views

Number of times the video has been shared

Video Likes

Subscription driven videos tend to rank higher

Small correlation with keyword rich video tags and rankings

Exact match keyword at the start of the Video title

Zero correlation between video descriptions and rankings

68.2% of videos on the first page of YouTube are in HD (Backlinko, 2017)

YouTube Stats

Youtube is the second largest search engines after Google

YouTube is available and used in 88 countries around the world

It is the second largest social media platform with over 1.5 billion monthly users, second only to Facebook (2 billion) and more than twice the number of Instagram (700 million)

500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

Mobile viewing makes up half of the site’s streaming.

Verify YouTube channel

YouTube Verification Badge

Verification badge indicates the channel belongs to an established creator or is the official channel of a brand. Getting your verification is easy as long as you have met the verification badge requirement.

I was going through the requirements and it said “Once your channel reaches 100,000 subscribers, you’re eligible to submit a request to YouTube for a verification badge” – In contrast I have seen channels who have less subscribers and have the verification badge. See Qualcomm Example.

Add social media links

Add a branded cover photo

Cover photos as we have seen on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are key to a brand’s online success. Normally cover photo’s is an area to highlight business mission statement, upcoming events, or updates. As soon as a viewer lands on your channel automatically the focus goes to the cover photo.

YouTube Channel keywords

YouTube uses Channel Keywords, Description and Videos to understand your channel’s overall topic and category. If channel keywords optimized the right way, you can boost the rankings for all of the uploaded videos into the channel.

Use Approximately 5-7 Keywords – If used too many, you dilute the importance of each one.

50 Character keywords are the sweet spot for channel keywords.

You can also get channel keyword ideas by going to competitors Youtube channel. Visit the link to find the steps.

Keywords related to industry and brand

How to Find – Channel Keywords YouTube

YouTube Video title

YouTube Video Title is important for the overall performance of the video on YouTube for two main reasons: 1: CTR 2: Video SEO

Include exact match Keyword in Video Title

Shorter titles work best as longer titles can be cut off depending on the browser, search engine or device people use. limit video titles to five words or less

YouTube Video description

Video description is a piece of metadata that helps YouTube understand the content & context of the video. If you skip giving a description to a video Google will assume something different and your rankings will suffer.

At least 150+ words. Just like the title, make sure to include relevant keywords & Optimize for CTR

Repeat Target Keyword 2-3 times and description and use related keywords.

YouTube states that your video’s metadata (including your title & description) plays a role in the Suggested Video Algorithm. Suggested videos are generated based on videos that viewers may be interestedinwatchin next, depending on what they were doing and watching beforehand.

Follow This Video Description Template from BackLinko.com

YouTube Video tags

Tags are another piece of metadata to give YouTube and Google information about your video including videos topic, category and more.

A recent study found a small but significant relationship between tags and YouTube rankings (Backlinko)

Make sure that your first tag is the exact match keyword that you want to rank.

Use a mix of Broad and Focused (2-3 words) Keywords

Stuffing videos with dozens of tags can do more harm than good.

5-8 well-researched and relevant tags are better than 20 generic ones that will get lost in the shuffle.

TagsYouTube is a free tool that generates a list of related tags for you to use on your YouTube videos.

VidIQ Boost also suggests tags for you within the YouTube video editor

YouTube Video Thumbnails

Thumbnails have a big effect on CTR (click-through rates) – meaning the right one could maximize your views and thus your ranking.

Videos that have customized thumbnails always outperform those that use automatically generated images. Create and upload a custom thumbnail for each of your videos.

It’s a good idea to create a general template for your video thumbnails where your logo is prominently displayed in a fixed place and background colors are the same.

Include human faces whenever possible as they draw attention and make sure the foreground stands out from the background

Google displays thumbnail at a smaller size in search results. It’s a good idea to test your thumbnails in smaller sizes to make sure they still look clear.

YouTube Video Closed Captions

For videos that contain spoken-word content, YouTube allows you to add captions. However, adding closed captions is something that a lot of publishers neglect to do, which is a big mistake.

Adding closed captions to your videos is beneficial for rankings for two key reasons:

It opens up your video to a much larger audience, including deaf viewers.

Viewers who speak a different language to the one spoken in the video. All this boost view counts, and thus, your rankings.

YouTube does offer automatic captioning, which is far from perfect, and you may have to make corrections. Alternatively, you can upload the captions yourself.

YouTube Video File Names SEO Optimization

Optimize the raw file names of your videos and thumbnail images for SEO by including keywords separated by -or _ in the saved file names. For example, your video file name can have the format keyword1- keyword2.wmv and your thumbnail image file name can be in the format keyword1- keyword2.jpg.